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What Was Old Is Young Again

By

Andrew Stark

Updated July 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET

In one of the more profound moments on "The Simpsons," a successful pretzel vendor named Frank recalls how he once believed he was unsuited for the pushcart trade. That was "the old me," Frank says, "which was, ironically, the young me."

I know it's just television, but it's a deep remark. Why do we refer to the time before Christ as the ancient world, when, in fact, civilization was in its infancy then? Why, as Francis Bacon asked, don't we instead think of our own time as "the true antiquity...